Skullcrack City (24 page)

“Told you, boss.”

“Well, then, I’m going to sit back down. Gun man, do you want me to be seated?”

“Uh, sure.” I was kind of thrown off.

Buddy settled back into the couch, air puffing from the leather beneath him.

“So, gun man, how long have you known Boudreaux?”

“What?”

“I’m assuming this is for money, since I wouldn’t grant Boudreaux’s request for a raise…”

“Boss, no. I don’t know these fuckers. I’ve never seen them before.”

“I’m talking to gun man, Boudreaux. No need for your theatrics. How much do I have to pay you to discontinue this charade?”

Dara walked over and stood beside me, then let out a huff.

“She’s relentlessly serious, isn’t she?” I pictured the grim look on her face earlier as she’d placed an arm lock on Huey’s courier and then swiftly choked him into unconsciousness. Serious, for her, was just the tip of a pyramid built on persistence and drive. It was why it felt special when she joked with me and let me see beyond her default settings. I looked over to see Dara sweating, arms tensed, her mouth compressed to a thin line. There was something stunning about the tautness of her body, and I wanted to make a statue in her honor, or kiss the side of her face, but then I saw the massive guy in handcuffs on the floor behind her and remembered this was a hostage situation and we were in negotiations with a man who wasn’t quite sure if we existed.

Dara remained focused. “I am serious, and I need you to understand that this is very real, and that if you don’t help us, you will find yourself disconnected from your fancy luggage over there.” She pointed her pistol at his brain, still sitting on its stately column. It hadn’t moved even as he’d fumbled around the room. I guessed the column was custom and had some kind of suction cups to keep the brain box steady. Did he fly with that thing, or have one fabricated for any place he was a frequent guest?

“Doyle! Gun!”

I’d let my arm drop, caught in the mental drift. The few hours of rest Dara and I had tucked away weren’t enough to return me to proper function. I righted my pistol.

“Listen to your cruel mistress, gun man!” Buddy found us amusing. The expression on his face made me feel like a jester performing for a child king. “You two have a desperation in your faces which makes me like you. This isn’t a money squeeze, is it? You’d already have a wrench to my brainjack like the ogres AsparaGus sent to extort me.”

“No money, Buddy. We’re looking for a friend of yours.”

“Oh. I’m afraid you’re far too early. Bobby won’t be here for another week. He used to arrive day of show, but the Center fucked up his lighting last time, so he’s running an extra rehearsal. Even so, we’ll be waiting until next Thursday. Are we camping out? I’ll need my supplies. You must be the couple from…just a moment.” Buddy reached over and gave the top of his brain box two thumps with his fist. “I needed to jog my memory.” He turned to us, gauged the reception to the gag. Dara was stone-faced. I did my best not to laugh. Buddy shrugged off the dead air. “That’s right—the Stockholm couple. You guys really don’t give up. Bobby must have woven quite a spell on you.”

Dara walked around the ottoman, raised her foot, and brought her heel down on Buddy’s instep.

Buddy yowled and clutched his foot close to his body. Then he closed his eyes and said, “Change to bird. Change to bird.”

He opened his eyes, dismay apparent, the absence of avian transformation finally forcing him to accept that this was truly happening. “Alright, invaders. What do I have to do to make you leave?”

“All we really need is a medical referral.” I wondered why she wasn’t just saying Dr. Tikoshi’s name, then realized she was leaving gaps to allow Huey plausible deniability. “Who does your work?”

“Oh, come on, you guys—you know I’ve got a private contract. I can’t divulge my doctor’s name or every two bit mutie on the circuit will be hitting him up for their mods.” Dara pulled the Keyless Entry Fob of Doom from her pocket and showed it to Buddy. He was unimpressed.

“You’re going to open your car from far away if I don’t refer you to my doctor?”

“No, boss. Tell her what she wants.” Boudreaux spoke as urgently as he could, doing his best to remain still and save his hands. “You could always go back to Dr. Shinori.”

“Shinori never did a damn thing without consulting Tikoshi. Besides, he tried to bootleg my surgery videos. He’s dead to me.”

“I know, boss.” Boudreaux sighed, clearly weary of having tended to this collapsing man’s whims for so long. He addressed Dara. “Listen, lady—what you’re doing now isn’t right. Buddy isn’t
here
, you know? He’s had a hard road since he lost his mom and between all the surgeries and the meds he’s…he’s somewhere else and if you use that on him it’s like kicking a coma patient in the teeth. So, please, put the SoniScrape back in your pocket and talk to me.”

Buddy beamed. “Boudreaux loves me!”

Maybe Boudreaux did love Buddy. Maybe he loved his paycheck. Regardless, he could form coherent ideas and never tried to turn into a bird, so he felt like a much stronger resource.

“Okay,” she said to Boudreaux, “we need to meet Buddy’s doctor, stat.”

“I can make that happen. If we do that, you let Buddy and me go?”

“Yes. I promise.”

“Even though we’ve seen your faces?”

He had a point. Dara had nixed the anti-rec masks, figuring five star hotel security wasn’t going to let us stroll through the lobby looking like we fronted a bad heavy metal band.

“Yes. You know it doesn’t really matter who we are. We’re not here for your client, and we’ll never trouble you again. You seem like a reasonable man, which means you’ll be wise enough to know that’s the truth. You’ll move on after this is over. And
that guy
…”

Buddy had closed his eyes again, and it sounded like he was whispering, “Lift as vapor. Lift as vapor.”

“That guy might not ever know this happened.”

The rear storage space of Buddy’s SUV was crowded. I guessed that the commercials for his rig never advertised, “The trunk area fits up to two full grown anti-Vakhtang missionaries and one man’s disembodied brain.”

Dara was spooned into my body with her arms wrapped around Buddy’s box, her pistol aimed at the cable junction where the fiber optic lines ran into the container and transitioned to a baffling mix of wiring and human matter.

The cerebrospinal fluid definitely needed a refresher. I didn’t know if Buddy’s gray matter was shedding a soup of dead cells, or if some chemical was tainting the mix, but his brain looked like it was floating in an unfiltered, long forgotten fish tank. No wonder the guy had gone loop-de-loop.

Boudreaux drove and Buddy rode shotgun. I wasn’t sure we could trust the bodyguard at the wheel, but Dara had figured this was the only way to make the approach without spooking Dr. Tikoshi. We had Boudreaux’s primary source of income hostage. We had the SoniScrape, whatever the hell that was. Hopefully those things were enough to keep Boudreaux from driving us to some kind of safe house where other employees of Buddy’s were waiting to gun us down.

I hadn’t been so close to a woman in ages, and the heat from Dara’s body slipped through my shirt and made me want to push closer to her, but I wasn’t sure if that was where we were at, or if there was any “we” at all, so I read the room and realized that even if she was in love with me this was no time for a make-out session.

Plus, Buddy’s brain box smelled weird. Where had this thing been? What secretions had coated its shining surface? I pictured labia sliding against the enclosure, the brain looking out and wondering why these fleshy flowers were so eager to break in.

It helped to crush the ardor.

The smell of Dara’s skin brought it back. I hoped my erection would tuck down the left side of my boxers instead of probing outwards, searching for access. I looked to the sky outside the windows and saw high-rises rolling by. Clustered masses of neon bullshit, an unavoidable enfilade of advertisements. Money in constant motion. I thought of the bank. Ardor was again defeated.

Then, there
he
was, Robbie Dawn at billboard height. “ONE NIGHT ONLY AT THE FREEDOM FINANCE MUTUAL CENTER!” The show date was next Friday.

Three echoes:

He’s crazy, and he’s working on something to do with drums. The last part is the dawn.

And

This is some serious cosmic serendipity manifested consciousness shit.

And

Bobby won’t be here for another week.

Bobby/Robbie/Robert Matthew Linson/Robbie Dawn.

Robbie Dawn/SelPak Transfers/Anson Biomed/Dr. T./Delta MedWorks.

Poison money moving in all directions. Bad business. Further echoes from a distant reality, but they sounded so close now.

Even my new friends who fought drug-induced metaphysical vortexes and used bugs for medicine had thought my Robbie Dawn fixation was cuckoo bullshit, but I wasn’t high now, and this wasn’t some daffy hallucination. This confirmed Dr. Shinori’s illustrated assertions. This was real. It had to be.

I yelled from my storage space at the back of the vehicle.

“Buddy, how did you meet Robbie Dawn?”

“Boudreaux, I think the truck is asking me questions.”

“No, boss—there are two people with guns in the back. They’re forcing us to take them to your doctor.”

“Really? That’s a problem. Why are they asking about Bobby?”

“I don’t know, boss.”

“Okay, well, I’ll clear things up for them. HELLO, TRUNK PEOPLE. MY FRIEND BOBBY IS NOT A DOCTOR OR A PRODUCT NAMED ROBBIE. HE IS A TIMELESS MAN WITH THE VOICE OF AN ANGEL. Do you think that satisfied them?”

“I doubt it, boss.”

I wasn’t sure how to crack Buddy’s code. I slapped the top of his brain box twice, hoping that might shock him into coherence. I wondered if we were causing a delay, by dragging his brain all the way back here. Were we reducing his bandwidth and waiting for thoughts to render? I decided to take a “When in Rome” approach and speak to him in my most addlepated Gibberese.

“Buddy, this is Trunk Man. You have become a future mist and slipped forward in time to a false reality. This has never happened, so you may speak your true heart and leave old feelings trapped in another universe.”

“That’s wonderful, Trunk Man. Do you promise not to breathe me in?”

“I’m not even here. I’m a broadcast bounced off a dying sun.”

Dara shook her head as if this was a futile line of pursuit, but I continued, thinking provocation might force his ego to surface and keep him focused.

“Your friend Robbie…”

“It’s Bobby.”

I took a deep breath and remembered I had to adjust to Buddy’s boggled reality for this to work.

“Sorry. Your friend
Bobby
is much more famous than you, and his talents are natural.”

“Striving and changing are fundamental to nature, too. Bobby was born with his talents, but I cultivated mine. The butterfly is as natural as the praying mantis.”

Dara slapped her forehead.

“You are wise. But what of Bobby’s fame? You have sacrificed so much more to become what you are.”

“Bobby has more abstractions to trade and more toys to play with. Neither of us can casually grab a cup of coffee without horrible consequences. Once you lose the coffee run, everything else is just details…Trunk Man, I am convinced I have legs. And if I know about the legs, that means I have eyes to see.”

Shit. Don’t lose him.

“Buddy, you’re slipping out of the future mist. You’ll be solid soon. Now’s the time to purge yourself of ill will. Tell me how you really feel about Bobby.”

“I’m scared for him, Trunk Man. I don’t want to believe what I’ve heard, but whenever I don’t want to believe a thing, it becomes the truth. I have bad karma.”

“What have you heard about Bobby?”

“Dr. T. is working for him, too. But not with his body. He’s doing something else for him. Bobby has been running with wolves. His power isn’t his own. Not anymore.”

“What is Dr. T. doing for Bobby? Is it something to do with drums?”

“I don’t want to say. Bobby never tells me, but when I asked Dr. T. he started smiling, and that’s how I know they’re doing something awful. Dr. T. usually only smiles when he talks about the war.”

“What war?”

“My foot hurts, Trunk Man. I think I’m here. I think this is real.”

“This isn’t real. They’re trying to diffuse your future mist with…um…solar flares.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Trunk Man. God, my
head
…”

Boudreaux was right—Buddy wasn’t
here
, and now I was squatting in his busted-up eggshell construct of a mind like a reckless hobo, stomping holes in the floor and lighting trash fires. I felt like a bastard.

“Never mind, Buddy. Thank you.”

Dara turned toward me and gave me a single nod that looked like approval. She whispered, “You did what you could.”

“What did I even do? Confuse the Mad Hatter?”

“You put us closer to the truth. We have to know what the Vakhtang are doing in order to stop them. And now we know you’re not just a Robbie Dawn stalker. We were right about Dr. Shinori’s puzzle—there really is something happening between Robbie and Dr. T. and I think it goes even deeper. ‘
Bobby is running with wolves.
’ I know you heard that.”

“Now you sound crazy. Are you sure you’re not a future mist too?”

“But nothing
feels
crazy right now. Maybe Huey was right—this is some kind of convergence. I know you can feel it too. Something is happening. I think you and I are supposed to be here. I keep trying to figure out why Ms. A. stopped to save me even when she must have known the Vakhtang were coming for us. You could have run, and left me there, but you didn’t. The two of you saved me. It had to be for something.”

“It’s just what happened, in the moment. We survived.”

“No. It’s something more.”

And then she turned her face back toward the front of the truck. Her left hand found mine. She arched her lower back and pushed her hips against me.

At the time I was so bewildered that I assumed the hand was intentional, a show of camaraderie in our madhouse, but the thing with the hips was wishful thinking on my part, a trick of the rumbling road.